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Interference in the production of Italian subject and object wh-questions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2011

MARIA TERESA GUASTI ,
CHIARA BRANCHINI  and
FABRIZIO AROSIO
MARIA TERESA GUASTI*
Affiliation:
University of Milano–Bicocca
CHIARA BRANCHINI
Affiliation:
University of Milano–Bicocca
FABRIZIO AROSIO
Affiliation:
University of Milano–Bicocca
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Maria Teresa Guasti, Dipartimento di Psicologia, University of Milano–Bicocca, Piazza dell'Ateneo Nuovo 1, Milano2012 6, Italy. E-mail: Mariateresa.guasti@unimib.it
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Abstract

We investigate the production of subject and object who- and which-questions in the Italian of 4- to 5-year-olds and report a subject/object asymmetry observed in other studies. We argue that this asymmetry stems from interference of the object copy in the AGREE relation between AgrS and the subject in the Spec of the verb phrase. We show that different avoidance strategies are attempted by the child to get around this interference, all boiling down to a double checking of agreement: AGREE and Spec-Head. Then, we evaluate our approach from a cross-linguistic perspective and offer an account of the differences observed across early languages. Because our account seems to call both for a grammatical and a processing explanation, we end with a critical discussion of this dichotomy.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 185 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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